Meg McClellan, coordinator for the Starzinger Writing Center, first invited students to consider the special class during Morning Reports where D. Colin appeared and performed one of her poems, detailing a little bit about the class and the importance of poetry in inciting and recording social change. The class is made possible by the Sides Visiting Writer Series, an endeavor that seeks to give students exposure to those who have made a career out of some form of writing. 

“I thought it would be great to have her as a Sides Visiting Writer because she is a local poet,” says Meg, reflecting on inviting D. to come teach. “So that made it easy to schedule, but more significantly a lot of her work is social activism, and that is very much a relevant focus for students at Emma.”

There is no prerequisite for classes like the one D. taught, except for a required interest and curiosity for the topic at hand, and most classes top-out at around 8-10 students (though they may be smaller). “It’s meant to be a low-stress, fun way to get to know a certain kind of writing,” Meg says. This semester there is a course at Emma focused on reading poetry, but not as much on writing it—it seemed like a good time to offer a class focused on creation.

The low-pressure environment of this kind of class allows students to explore the forms without the burden of a regular class, but still with the kind of structure that helps them produce original work. The first assignment for the poetry class was to write a prose-poem to a historical person, or event, that each student found particularly important to them. “Within writing that first piece of prose I discovered a writer in myself that I forgot existed,” says Kelsey D. ’25. 

“I originally signed up for D. Colin's Writing Poetry for Social Change class to rediscover my love for poetry and have a creatively stimulating class in the middle of one of my more academically challenging school days; little did I know that the class would quickly become more than that,” she added.

Grace M. ’24, a student in the Signature program who has been working towards producing a chapbook of original work exploring various literary forms, also took the class, and found that working with D. helped “us in finding more authentic versions of our own writing through poetry that can have an impact on a lot more people than just ourselves, and I am so grateful to have gotten that experience.”

Emma Willard School will host D. Colin again for the opening of the Starzinger Writing Center on May 15, which will also feature special guests Stephanie Sides '73, who provided funding to explore the possibility of a writing center at Emma, and Page Starzinger '76, who provided the naming gift to endow the center and the program. D. will read a selection from her work alongside some of the young poets in her class reading the work they produced for it.